The “Social Media Mix” is the combination of social media channels that you identify as best suited for reaching your target audience, taking into account the restrictions set by your social media budget. It is important to perform a good audience segmentation first, as this will help you in determining the social media channels that fit your target audiences.

In this post I describe how I established the Audience Segmentation and Social Media Mix (or “Channel Strategy”) for the eSkills for Jobs 2014 campaign.

To determine the Social Media Mix, I further segmented these main target audiences into specified target groups, intermediary audiences and multipliers:

Social Media Channel Identification

The next step was to identify those social media channels that are most likely to be used by each of the target audience segments, based on general information regarding user types & demographics of different Social Media networks [1].

Students for example are said to be the main users of Tumblr. Google Plus is also said to be heavily used by students, together with tech savvy people. On the other hand, young people do not use LinkedIn at all.

In this case, also the criterium of social media network users being easily identifiable as belonging to a specific audience segment was used to identify a channel as a candidate for the Social Media Mix. Enterpreneurship Projects for example are easily identifiable through Twitter’s bio, while for Parents this isn’t the case at all.

The exercise resulted in the following social media channels being identified as (primarily) used by the different audience segments:

Social Media Mix

Because of budget restrictions, only a few of above identified channels were selected to convey targeted messages to the different audience segments. This selection resulted in the Social Media Mix of the eSkills for Jobs 2014 campaign, being a Facebook Fan Page, a Twitter account, a LinkedIn Group and an Instagram profile: